Saturday, June 17, 2006

My sister gave birth to her twins around eight o'clock last night. Boys, they is, and they go by the names of Joshua Remy and Ender...something. I forget Ender's middle name.

Being the literary family that we are, my sister named her kids after books. The most obvious is Ender from the book Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. Joshua Remy is named after a character in the Bible and Gambit from the X-Men comic books.

They're pretty big for twins.

In other news, I now work in the reptile department at the pet shop and I am seizing every opportunity I can to be bitten by new animals. Mostly baby snakes have been biting me, but I'm pretty sure the Giant African Millipede nipped at me.

I feel odd when feeding the baby snakes. They eat baby mice, which are very similar to the pet mice and rats and other rodents I used to help people care for as pets. It's not a very good idea to feed live mice and rats to snakes because they can still bite and sometimes injure the snake. So it's my job to kill the mice.

It's not that I have any moral objection to killing baby mice. After all, it's them or me. A snake has got to eat. I know that if those mice were given the chance they would kill me and everyone I love. But I just don't like doing it.>br>